NHL penalties:

Do you believe in makeup penalties? My woman laughs at me when I yell at the refs that it’s time to even things up and give the Sabres a power play.

But the phenomenon of makeup calls seems to be real to me. If the number of penalties is really lopsided to one team, more often than not the refs will start to even it up, sometimes on calls that appear to be really questionable.

Of course, this is all just conjecture and it might just be in our minds. The only way we can really tell if makeup calls happen is by looking at statistics. Luckily someone has dug into some stats on this and can tell us whether or not it really does go on.

I happened upon a blog called Sabermetric Research – and no they didn’t just spell Sabres wrong. Sabremetrics is apparently, “the specialized analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity”. Oof, what? Couldn’t you just say nerd stats for sports? (Also, this statistic analysis isn’t just for baseball.)

He chucked data where both teams got penalties at the same time with the goal of seeing whether the currently penalized team would be more or less likely to get the next penalty.

Amazingly, he found that there was roughly a 60% chance that the other team would get the next penalty.

Is this incontrovertible proof of the makeup call? Well, not necessarily. We don’t know for sure that it was referee bias that led to the “makeup call”. Perhaps it was the penalized team playing it safe, or the team on the power play playing more aggressively even after the power play.

It gets better though. The longer that time has elapsed since the last penalty, the less likely it is that a “makeup call” will happen.

That’s consistent with many theories. The “referees are biased” theory would say that referees “forget” to even things up as the game goes on. The “other team wants revenge and plays aggressively” theory would say that if they don’t get revenge early, they don’t need it as much later. And the “penalized team takes fewer chances” theory would say that as time goes on, the players “forget” that they have to be more careful.

You can wade way deep into more stats and discussion about this if you really want to. There are two followup posts at the Sabremetrics Research blog and tons of comments, but that post itself is enough to make one’s head spin.

So we still don’t know conclusively if makeup calls are referee bias and probably never will. But I’m going with my gut on this one, and like most things, all we need sometimes is a vague stat to backup what we think is already true. 60% chance that the other team gets the next penalty? Damn those refs, they’re biased! Now give us a makeup call!